Saturday, January 31, 2009

Parker poesy

Dorothy Parker on Updike's The Poorhouse Fair, Feb. 1959: "Perhaps this is a purely personal matter, but I am always drawn to reading a book about a poorhouse—after all, it is only the normal curiosity to find out what it will be like in my future residence."

More wrongitude

Mr. Portis followed that novel with ''The Dog of the South,'' again based upon a quest. A young man sets out from Arkansas for Mexico on the trail of his runaway wife, her lover and his stolen Ford Torino (it's the car he really wants back). Though well received, ''The Dog of the South'' lacks the drive and purity of ''True Grit.'' There are ominous, extended sojourns on the other side of that elusive line that separates being funny from trying to be funny.

Unfortunately, ''Masters of Atlantis'' rarely veers to the right side of that line. For some unknown reason, Mr. Portis has chosen to ignore the rich and varied material offered by history.

Hot fuss

I must say that I couldn't quite understand what all the fuss was about when the Charles Portis novel hit the best-selling lists last year. The book was strictly freeze-dried nostalgia, which imitated the flavor of nineteenth-century American writing without ever making you believe it was as good as the real thing (Mark Twain, Bret Harte).

The movie has its own formidable heritage with which it has to contend, but since the men who made it are the ones who contributed to that same heritage, True Grit seems more authentic as a film than as a piece of written literature.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Flogging the language

I first heard about Stoner back in grad school. I’d been on a Denis Johnson jag (weren’t we all?) and so naturally assumed the novel was a florid account of reefer madness. This is how Stoner begins:

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course.

To understand how audacious I found this opening you would have to know how loyal I was, back then, to the bromides of MFA programs: show, don’t tell, make it new, and so on. Because I lacked confidence in the stories I was trying to tell, and because those stories were half-formed at best, I was constantly withholding basic facts from the reader. It was my assumption this would beguile them. I also crammed my pieces with histrionic plot twists and quirky characters. When that didn’t work, I flogged the language mercilessly.

* * *

Oddly (this is Ed speaking again) I have read John Williams—but not Stoner. A historical novel called Augustus! We had to read it in 9th grade!

If only someone could write a whole book like this

This paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with anything.It is here merely to fill up space. Still, it is words,rather than repeated letters, since the latter might notgive the proper appearance, namely, that of an actual note.

What's up with food?

Burgertime

A month later, Molly told me to put shake mix in the shake machine. I put a full bag in the machine. She said, "It still needs mix." So, I put in another full bag. It was totally full. Molly (angry) said, "We need shake mix." Mark was there and I showed him that the machine was full. He said there had to be something wrong with the machine. One of the lines was loose. Molly should not have talked to me the way she did.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 26, 2009

I. "I think that the whole world of Kafka is to be found in a far more complex way in the stories of Henry James." —Borges interview, The Paris Review(Via.)

II. L.G. Thos. sends this "keen observation by John Banville": "Who but Nabokov would invent a villain with an x in each of his names?"

Dzyd trivia: Name that villain!

III. Supplementary VN trivia from me: What VN book, turned into a film with Anna Karina, interestingly features a character named Dorianna Karenina?

IV. Most of the stories in Stephen King's Night Shift were originally published in Cavalier (?). Two (including "Children of the Corn") were published in Penthouse. One story appeared in Cosmopolitan, another in Maine (?), and another in Gallery (?).

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Goats and raves

In the NYT, Dennis on the films of Brillante Ma Mendoza: "But the one scene that gained instant notoriety at Cannes was less confrontational than surreal: a stray goat wanders into the theater, setting off an antic chase. The reality that inspired it was, if anything, stranger. “In that province there was a crocodile that went inside one of the cinemas,” Mr. Mendoza said.

Snarge at large

The National Museum of Natural History in Washington may not leap to mind when both engines on a high-tech plane quit at 3,200 feet. But around the corner from the stuffed African elephant that greets the visiting hordes of schoolchildren, down a back hall from the employee bike rack, a staff of four in the Feather Identification Lab took in samples from 4,600 bird-plane collisions, or bird strikes, last year. Arriving mostly in sealed plastic bags, these included birds’ feet, whole feathers or tiny bits of down, and pulverized bird guts, known as snarge. —NYT

Saturday, January 24, 2009

300 words

On his blog, Frederik Pohl writes about collaborating with Arthur C. Clarke on The Last Theorem (a book I reviewed, asking, "One wonders how stable the manuscript was when Clarke died"). It sounds like an impossible task, and Pohl's blog post is more moving and interesting than the book itself.

For all the time between leaving Chicago and our actual boarding of the riverboat I hadn’t tried to keep in touch with Arthur. But our boat was well provided with email, and one of the first things I emailed him to ask him concerned some interesting alien characters in his notes. These were called the Grand Galactics. They pretty much ran things, and I could see how useful they might be in the finished story, so I invited him to tell me every thought he had ever had concerning these wondrous super-beings. His response, though, was a lot less helpful than I had hoped. Everything he knew about the Grand Galactics, he told me, was in those pages of notes his agent had passed along to me. At one time, he said, no doubt he had possessed any number of additional ideas about them. He didn’t have them any more. They were gone without a trace.

Marveling, worried, I asked Arthur for details. He could give me very few. Apparently a funny thing had happened to Arthur on a day in 2003. After signing all those contracts he had waked up one morning and discovered that he couldn’t remember how to write any of them..

Don’t ask me to explain how this was possible. Arthur himself wasn’t very good at explaining it to me, but there it was. Every word of how to write any of those books had vanished from his mind. He said that since then he had had reasonable luck in writing 300-word greetings to various groups around the world who wanted to honor him. But nothing more ambitious than that. It was as far as his writing skills now went.

Infinite best

In 2005, with a shooting draft finished and the casting process already begun, Wallace, the literary phenom who also penned the groundbreaking novel "Infinite Jest," called Krasinski to give him his blessing on the project. "He said, 'What's it scripted around?' " the multi-hyphenate remembers. "I said, 'A woman doing her dissertation around feminism looking into the role of the modern man in the post-feminist era.' There was a silence. And he said, 'I never figured out how to do that, how to make them all relate together. That sounds awesome.' It was probably one of the greatest days of my life!" —L.A. Times

EP on EVP

"This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living," wrote Don DeLillo 20 years ago in White Noise. Geoffrey Sax's film White Noise isn't the long-awaited adaptation, alas—no Hitler Studies here—but for much of its running time, it creeps along like a ghoulishly literal take on that D.D. sentence. Beginning with a long quote from Thomas Edison that, unfolding between simulated bad-reception skips, suggests the paranormal-receptive ability of inventions to come, White Noise quickly establishes a crude goosebump factory that goes straight to the spine.

Six months after the mysterious death of his novelist wife, Anna, grieving architect Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) gets a call from her cell phone—but the line goes dead. Rattled, he contacts an expert in electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), a fringe practice whose adherents patiently troll the airwaves for messages from the beyond. Jonathan soon becomes obsessed, finding an ally in fellow practitioner Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger). Pimping out his glass-clad bachelor pad with banks of monitors and recording equipment, Jonathan reads raster as Rorschach, hearing voices of the deceased buried under oceans of static. Anna's voice leads him to the scene of a gruesome accident, where he rescues a baby—but it dawns on him that the swirling spirits on the other side might actually be malevolent, revealing glimpses of deaths before they happen (a tinge of Minority Report).

Keaton's not much more than a plug-in here, though in places he manages some economical emoting that grounds the wilder goings-on. His character resonates as a morbid stand-in for anyone chained to the computer screen, glued to any number of devices: cell phone, car radio, answering machine. As in The Ring, technology is omnipresent but uncanny in its obscurity—what is static, anyway? White Noise teems with whiplash scare tactics, but ably mines the same dead zone previously mapped in flashes: The Outer Limits' vertical-horizontal prologue, the communion with snowed-out screen in Poltergeist.

The transfixingly weird Birth crawled down the slope of reason by the end, to some viewers' chagrin; White Noise vigorously pushes the supernatural line throughout, but unfortunately its final movement is so incoherent that the whole thing collapses. It's as if the cultural white noise of a thousand indifferent suspense flicks has gathered to drown out the initial spark of invention with a knee-jerk flurry of howling demons and unrelenting studio rain. —PTSNBN, Jan. 4, 2005

And...I was one of maybe eleven people who liked the DeLillo-penned Game Six!

If last year's rerelease of 1975's The Passenger felt like the ultimate adaptation of an unpublished Don DeLillo novel, it's because the film resembled a template for his books: urbane and mythic, a circuitous and cryptic death trip. The new Game Six, from a DeLillo screenplay, has an anonymous indie look, but with its absurdist cab ride through gridlocked midtown, airborne toxic disaster, ruminations on personal and public history, and baseball fetishizing, it's like volume one of DeLillo's Greatest Hits. DeLillo's stylized dialogue, part brow-slapping smartitude, part beautiful nonsense, finds an ideal mouthpiece in Michael Keaton. As playwright Nicky Rogan, he gives every line just the right spin: He describes a fellow writer, now half crazed, as "someone who sits in a small, dark apartment eating soft, white bread." Rogan's new play, a deeply personal venture, is opening on the same night of a climactic Red Sox–Mets game. Meanwhile, a dreaded critic (Robert Downey Jr.) girds himself for his assignment in his toiletless hovel, while the lead actor is having memory problems due to a parasite in his brain, a bug contracted in Borneo or perhaps Burma. ("Why are we blaming the third world for our parasites?" someone muses.) For a Greek chorus, there's a radio reporter delivering hilariously unhelpful traffic updates spun into glum meditations ("Birth, death, walk, don't walk"). Despite a late-inning swoon of pat emotional generosity, Game Six is a gratifying playground of high-wire language. —PTSNBN, Feb. 26, 2006*

*This was one of the few times a movie ad quoted from one of my reviews. Check it out!

Thursday, January 22, 2009

A day without wings

For Levi Stahl

Wednesday, 22 August [1984]John A. Howard, Secretary of the Ingersoll Foundation, rang at 4.30 pm to say that I am, after all, to receive the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, notwithstanding the fact of not being prepared to travel to Chicago to collect it. I seem to have acted like someone who declares: 'I would not go to Chicago for Ten Thousand Pounds' (in fact somewhat more owing to the exchange). In palmier days I should have liked to see Chicago, a city which always sounds rather beautiful by its lake. Also Chicagoans encountered often seem rather agreeable. The trouble of such jaunts is the horrors of airports, combined with being these days unable to drink except in extreme moderation at parties, of which no doubt there would have been a spate.

Zoning out

The colorfield—or product placement?

"Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back . . . when brown can stick around . . . when yellow will be mellow . . . when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen. Say amen. And amen." —Rev. Joseph L. Lowery, inauguration benediction

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Prairie style

• This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2009. In our entry on Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected.

Paper blogs

Great white way

I. I bought The Atlantic yesterday (since it features two pieces by Dzyds)—I realize I like reading while eating, so this is much better than reading it online (no crumbs in the keyboard). (In a magazine-buying frenzy, I also picked up the new Boston Review, for an excellent appreciation of Thomas Disch by John Crowley, and other good-seeming stuff...even though of course BR is online, too...I did a lot of reading and eating yesterday.)(You should always buy The Believer; have you read the Theo Schell-Lambert piece yet???? You need to read it today. And you cannot read it online!) This bit in Hua's excellent piece, "The End of White America?"...

For [Stuff White People Like creator Christian] Lander, whiteness has become a vacuum. The “white identity” he limns on his blog is predicated on the quest for authenticity—usually other people’s authenticity. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto. You’re jealous! Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language. White culture is Family Ties and Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses—like, this is white culture. This is all we have.”

II. ...reminded me of this amazing rant:

—Why are you quoting John O'Hara to me at eight o'clock in the morning? said Isidor. —Well, there is a point, said MacK, I was looking at it last night. He's part of this White Culture which I'm just completely at the end of my—I'm flabbergasted and unable to comprehend any longer why and how anyone can continue to defend it, celebrate it, reinvent it—what does this great white culture, this white civilization, which all the idiots want to cherish, to keep pristine from the blacks and the Japanese and the Europeans and the gays and the Jews and the women—of what does it consist? I mean, let's really think—John O'Hara? Pearl Jam? Lawrence Welk? Elementary school book and Bible watercolor depictions of the past? CBS? —Not leaving out your great employer, said Isidor. —The Carpenters, said MacK, Fenimore Cooper, John Grisham? Red Skelton? Hallmark? Microsoft? Mobil? Bill Clinton? Jane Fonda, Walt Disney, American Gladiators? Pat Robertson, Gene Scott? John Willie? Loni Anderson? Jaclyn Smith? The AFL? I'm asking you, man, said MacK, I mean I'm asking all of the religionists and cross-burners and anti-abortionists and professional athletes and cheerleaders and militiamen prancing through the woods in camo, waving Bowie knives and their third grade spelling, I'm asking the gymnastic child-abuse coaches—this is what you've got? THIS?

The Harvester is such a nutty book that by the time you come to this passage it seems like just another of its forays into the crackpottery of its period. According to her biographer, Judith Reick Long, Gene Stratton-Porter never revised or cut; her novels—like the Harvester's hysterical sermon—just came pouring out of her. But racial theories were no passing fancy with her. They became the central theme of a noxious novel called Her Father's Daughter, written in 1921, after she had moved to Los Angeles and enthusiastically embraced the hatred for Chinese and Japanese immigrants by which early-twentieth-century California was seized. Its seventeen-year-old heroine, Linda Strong, talks like this:

The white man has dominated by his colour so far in the history of the world, but it is written in the Books that when the men of colour acquire our culture and combine it with their own methods of living and rate of production, they are going to bring forth greater numbers, better equipped for the battle of life, than we are. When they have got our last secret, constructive or scientific, they will take it, and living in a way that we would not, reproducing in numbers we don't, they will beat us at any game we start, if we don't take warning while we are in the ascendancy, and keep there.

[...]

The plot of Her Father's Daughter revolves around a Japanese A-student in a Los Angeles high school, named Oka Sayye, who is actually a forty-year-old man planted there by the Japanese government for God knows what reason, but who is clearly such a threat to the white world that in the end he has to be remorselessly pushed off a cliff by the heroine's Irish housekeeper. I'm not kidding. —Janet Malcolm, "Capitalist Pastorale," New York Review of Books

Monday, January 19, 2009

"Watch out!"

At Five Chapters today, you can read the first part of Caitlin Macy's short story "Eden's Gate," part of her forthcoming collection Spoiled.(Woah, I just tested that Amazon link and saw my blurb!) Caitlin's debut novel, The Fundamentals of Play (2000-ish), is a favorite of mine—one of those books I recommend when someone's about to go on vacation and needs something to read...it's a total page turner...

This might be a good time to say "Watch out!" for these books in the next few months (I read 'em all pretty recently):

February: John Haskell's Out of My Skin — wow. Kind of a perfect novel. Cool and unsettling.March: The aforementioned Caitlin Macy's Spoiled — includes "Christie," the "argument starter" mentioned in my blurb, plus other excellent stories (and argument starters). Ruthless! But also funny! (Some additions to the Invisible Library, too.)April: Hannah Berry's Britten and Brülightly (though now I see it's been moved to March) — totally satisfying graphic novel — I'll write more about it later.May: PERSONAL DAYS UK PAPERBACK!!!!!!! oh shut up

The invention of anything else

“A lot of [Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles] came unconsciously,” added Ms. Akerman, who is now 58. “When I wrote it, it ran like a river.” What she produced was less a script than “a nouveau roman book,” she said, a fastidious account of her heroine’s every action. “Delphine Seyrig complained that there was so much detail she didn’t have to invent anything.”

He did not get along with everyone, however. On the set of his 1997 film, “Lucie Aubrac,” based on the life of a heroine of the French resistance, he abruptly fired his lead actress, Juliette Binoche, for having too many opinions about how she should play the role.

“When a director is so possessive about his film it’s a nightmare,” Ms. Binoche said in an interview in The New York Times shortly after her dismissal. “You can’t work with someone like that.”

For the Invisible Library

"He had lived in the house for three hundred years, ever since his death, in fact, and was thought to be writing his autobiography, though as it was invisible no one had read it."—Joan Aiken, "Tea at Ravensburgh"

Friday, January 16, 2009

Fulmernating

This sounds like a name one might give to a reporter, when one doesn't want to give one's name:

Fulmer Duckworth, 41, who works in computer graphics for Bank of America — coincidentally, more than 20 of the passengers work for the bank, which is based in Charlotte — was in a meeting on the 29th floor of a building at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas when he saw the plane hit the water. —NYT

An Inquiry into Market Values and Philosophy of Bay Area radio in the '90s

back in the 1990s, in college, our friend ed park liked this particular song tom cochrane’s “life is a highway.” before he mentioned it, i had never heard of it. why? did that song simply never get big in the bay area when it came out? otherwise, was it not played either on alternative radio or else hip.hop radio? you see, the bay area went through much of the early 1990s without a top 40 radio station. did you realise that?

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Breaking news

Pittsburgh Mayor Asks to Remove Ravens From His Name

PITTSBURGH — To understand the depth of feeling here for the Steelers, consider the news conference Wednesday morning at the Allegheny County Department of Court Records.

There, Pittsburgh’s mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, filled out a Verified Petition for a Name Change in a ceremonial effort to convert his surname to Steelerstahl. It would be that way, he said, until the Steelers and the Ravens played Sunday for the American Football Conference title.

Ouroboros-Fortified Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 15, 2009

I. New York magazine gives the nod to Light Industry proprietors (and, most importantly, Dzyds) Ed and L.G. Thos. — as does Artforum! This pic is from Artforum (that's Thomas and Ed on the left...other dudes are Michael Azerrad and Jeff Krulik):

III. The Atlantic this month should be retitled "THE DIZZIES"??? Hua has the cover story, "The End of White America?"—two quotes for today:

A) “Have I read The Great Gatsby?” Combs said to a London newspaper in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby."

B) Similarly, Smirnoff struck marketing gold in 2006 with a viral music video titled “Tea Partay,” featuring a trio of strikingly bad, V-neck-sweater-clad white rappers called the Prep Unit. “Haters like to clown our Ivy League educations / But they’re just jealous ’cause our families run the nation,” the trio brayed, as a pair of bottle-blond women in spiffy tennis whites shimmied behind them. There was no nonironic way to enjoy the video; its entire appeal was in its self-aware lampooning of WASP culture: verdant country clubs, “old money,” croquet, popped collars, and the like.

There has been much chatter about Barack Obama as the answer to America’s racial gap, as a biracial black man whose roots stretch from Hawaii to Kenya, with an Ivy League pedigree and the seal of the South Side. But he is not the only one entering the White House who has seen both sides, who intuitively grasps the heroic American narrative of work ethic and family, and how that narrative historically failed black people. He is not the only one who walks in both worlds. Indeed, if you’re looking for a bridge, if you’re looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you’re looking for common ground, then it’s true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we’re talking about the right one.

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’. —Scientific American

Can you speak a bit about the genesis of Revolver and how you conceptualized this book? There are many levels of inventions engaged here: the patented products, such as the sewing machine and the revolver, mainstays now slowly becoming archaic; merchandise such as furniture and silverware that’s inextricably bound to its legendary manufacturers (Taylor & Sons, J.A. Henckels); and then there are those fashion industry icons (Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein) whose commodities are popularized by more contemporary mythologies of beauty and desire. Each presents a history that spins outward into other compelling human stories. How did you begin to gather all of these different objects and how did you evaluate whether or not they would be compatible in this community of poems?

The question of compatibility is a great way for me to think about my curatorial instinct in Revolver. Initially I set out to write about objects that were on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851— a sort of Victorian world’s fair—and I thought the book would be encyclopedic and touch on absolutely everything in the 1851 illustrated catalogue. The objects on display at the Great Exhibition were not chosen for their compatibility, but rather, the only thing they supposedly had in common with one another was their level of innovation and artfulness. It was an industrial fair, after all, and it was meant to show human progress and in particular British domination. But with just the tiniest bit of scratching at the surface of any of these weird objects, they began to display all sorts of unintended affinities: unfathomable violence, fierce issues of control, a nearly fetishistic interest in portability and adaptability that seemed to be in conversation with colonialism and Western expansion. As I started to discover this, I also began arbitrarily researching items related to 1951. It was no surprise that the vapor trails these newer objects left were as bellicose as the others; they weren’t vapor trails, they were warpaths. That made me a little dizzy. And I started to question my own encyclopedic urge, which was coming to feel really overwhelming, really wrongheaded. In the end, I evaluated what could be in the book based on the physical sensation I had in my body when I started doing the research. I remember, for instance, watching old Calvin Klein commercials on YouTube, and in one a young Brooke Shields is whistling “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” The vertigo of associations I felt fluttering within me, and the sheer empathy I felt with my whole body toward the material made me write the Klein poem; if I don’t have a physical sensation like that I don’t attempt a poem. As a result, I don’t write very often.

The two are still in disagreement about the exact day the newest, youngest member of the Russian River scene showed up on their doorstep—“a flinty-eyed poet with spiky blond hair and a wicked smirk,” as Nolan remembers it. But they agree on one thing: there was something special about the 23-year-old Jeffrey who rolled into town alone in the summer of ’75—steeped in Iggy Pop and Ted Berrigan—with a few boxes of belongings, a couple packs of Marlboro reds, and, as Codrescu describes it, “this crazy idea we all had at the time that you could still make a living as a poet.” Before long he was part of the Knotty Room roundtable, bullshitting between drags about the nature of truth and beauty and, probably just as often, the relative merits of various rock bands and the acquisition of illicit substances. He and Codrescu were instant friends, taking long walks and lingering at the local dive bars, where they’d do their best to parlay their poetic condition into rounds of free drinks. My aunt showed up later that year.

But there was much more writing still to emerge—other poems, manifestos, handbills, questionnaires, letters, novels, plays, and the elusive “Vancouver lectures”—which, even in incomplete form, had established themselves as an indispensable text for young poets. (The idea that writing poetry was a matter of taking dictation from unseen Martians seemed to make a good deal more sense than the theories of Allen Tate or Cleanth Brooks.)

V. Someone should write a novel or produce a sitcom in which Philip K. Dick, Jack Spicer, and Robert Duncan are roommates. (TRIVIA: What cult novel—not by PKD—is dedicated to Spicer?) From my L.A. Times review of PKD's Voices From the Street:

But mainstream acceptance was Dick's first novelistic ambition, one that took years to dispel. An early fan of “scientifiction” stories, Dick also read widely outside the genre. In 1940s Berkeley, beginning at age 19, he roomed in a converted warehouse occasionally occupied by literary figures like poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, with whom he struck up friendships. During this time, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin, he was inspired to steep himself in the classics (“I gained a working knowledge of literature from the Anabasis to Ulysses,” Dick wrote in a 1968 “Self-Portrait”), with special attention to modernists like Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos. Sutin notes that from 1951 to 1958, Dick wrote dozens of science-fiction stories and six science-fiction novels, all of which were published, and seven mainstream novels, none of which found a publisher in his lifetime.

Monday, January 12, 2009

"Afternoon" delight

I. Have been scrutinizing an old favorite, Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men. Some quotes:

It occurred to him to begin writing a novel, but his brain was almost at a standstill and it would be a mistake to make a false start.

The aura of journalism's lower slopes hung around him like a vapour.

Fotheringham said: 'He's one of those brilliant men whose mind has become a complete blank.' 'Is he?' 'You can imagine what good company he is.' 'Yes, indeed.' 'All the brains and understanding there and never the least danger that they are going to become a nuisance.' 'Wonderful.'

II.Taylor’s richly detailed work also calls attention to two breezy, auspicious first novels about the Bright Young People that are unfortunately out of print: Nancy Mitford’s “Highland Fling” and Anthony Powell’s “Afternoon Men.” Mitford was on the group’s periphery, and her book has much of the charm of “Vile Bodies”; Powell, a sometime member, shares Waugh’s piercing observations. Both novels appeared in 1931, an indication of how quickly the Bright Young People’s era receded. Even then Mitford, Powell and Waugh had the distance to mock its slight-as-a-bubble mentality. All three novels entice us into a frothy, evanescent world we have reason to envy, but not too much.

Something has changed in Bil Fox. Something that made him decide to come out of hiding and perform. In my brief exchange with Hagan, he hinted that Fox's return to music was spurred by the economy, and by the renewed interest in his music following the Believer story. It was a good story, and it could very well be the truth. However, for those in attendance last night, the whys, wheres and hows weren't important. We were seeing a Cleveland legend live, in person for the first time in a long, long time. —I Rock Cleveland

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Musical interlude

On Aug. 29, The New York Times published a dispatch by United Press International, reporting on the sentencing. A friend of Mr. Dylan showed the singer the article. Some accounts say he wrote the song ["The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"] at an all-night coffee shop on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, others that he wrote it at the singer Joan Baez’s house in Carmel, Calif. —NYT

That she’ll now be best known for her work in front of the camera is a turnabout not lost on Ms. DioGuardi, whose recent flirtations with fame have been short-lived and unsuccessful. In 2004 she formed the band Platinum Weird with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, after Jimmy Iovine of Interscope had asked them to write songs for the Pussycat Dolls. Platinum Weird was introduced slowly, with a confusing marketing plan involving a fake documentary about the band’s fake history. —NYT

Forbidden or Compulsory

Other music notes — "Stacy's Mom" came up on the Shuffle — it sounds like THE CARS..........Also newly HILARIOUS to me: The second vocal that repeats the last few words of the first ("business trip...give me the slip").

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Waiting for Goddard

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

Stardom as subject

Like Dana and Lisa, I felt a certain editorial detachment from most of the Oscar season's offerings, admiring the intelligence and technical dexterity of Frost/Nixon, Doubt, and (for its first two hours or so) Benjamin Button without quite losing myself in them. Revolutionary Road hit me harder; even though Leo and Kate's combined star wattage does mean you have to squint occasionally to see the actual movie they're in, I liked the meta-ness of the Titanic couple careening toward an iceberg of the soul. Actors reach a point at which their stardom almost unavoidably becomes a subject—or the subject—of whatever movie they're in. This is not necessarily a problem, as we saw this year with Robert Downey Jr. (while Tropic Thunder allowed him to disappear, Iron Man harnessed his past and persona effortlessly into the mythos of a rogue redeemed) and The Wrestler, which is virtually a documentary about Mickey Rourke—his ravaged face, his heap-of-ashes career—as much as it is a fiction about a body-slammer reaching the end of his tether.

Hard to stomach

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 6, 2008

I. Dzyd Dennis on David Fincher:

There is also the matter of his technical virtuosity, which tends to inspire both admiration and suspicion. A teenage apprentice at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, and then a hotshot director of commercials and music videos (including a brace of enormously influential ones for Madonna, at the height of her image-making powers), Mr. Fincher has always been in the business of expensive illusion and manufactured beauty. To call him a superficial stylist misses the point; in many of his films the surface is the substance. It is easy to get lost in — and perhaps as a result, to underestimate — the sheer sensory pleasures of his movies: their dynamic compositions and kinetic rhythms, sinuous camera movements and seamless digital wizardry. —NYT

APR 1: Three Hundred Tang Poems.A new translation of a beloved anthology of poemsfrom the golden age of of Chinese culture.Edited and translated by Peter Harris.An Everyman's Library title.256 pages. $13.50 ISBN 978-0-307-26973-7

Dizzies Press Release: Jeff Krulik at Light Industry

Jeff Krulik, the filmmaker who helped bring you you “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” (and the unlikely follow-up, “Neil Diamond Parking Lot”) stops off at Light Industry tonight to screen more of his rock ’n’ roll ephemera. His list of devil-horn-friendly material includes “Heavy Metal Picnic,” a 1985 fan vid; “Led Zeppelin Played Here,” which investigates their supposed first show in Washington on the eve of Nixon’s inauguration; and a history of the Ambassador Theater, a psychedelic temple that hosted Jimi Hendrix and a drunk Norman Mailer. Krulik will also talk with Michael Azerrad, author of “Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground 1981-1991.” Wear your most threadbare T-shirt. —NYT

Monday, January 05, 2009

From the margins

I had spent my senior year at Wellesley on "Moby-Dick," committing some of it to memory and wallowing in pessimistic transcendentalism. In the years since, I've reread it maybe more often than any other living American (or so I like to think), and I still have my ancient Modern Library edition, with its cryptic penciled marginalia:

Sunday, January 04, 2009

3 Feet Tall and Rising

I know Peter Rabe from a battered copy of "The Spy Who Was 3 Feet Tall." I never actually read it (and certainly didn't dream anyone would link its author to Nabokov and Hammett). The cover copy was well worth the price. The title character is a "pygmy" espionage agent nicknamed "Baby." I just love that premise, he's a spy and has to be inconspicuous.

Rabe is a criminally underrated writer, one whose work I'm less familiar than I ought to be. He wrote primarily in the 40s and 50s and Hard Case Crime is reissuing one of his books, STOP THIS MAN! in August, I think. Stark House has also reissued a number of Rabe novels, too.

So am I

Hammett, Nabokov, Rabe: An Eternal Golden Braid

We know Westlake was a Powell fan...here's another somewhat unexpected influence:

THIS WAS A VERY early novel, and the first one in which I did any experimenting. There were writers I admired -- Dashiell Hammett, Vladimir Nabokov, Peter Rabe -- who could do something I very much envied, which was to make you feel the emotion in a scene without ever referring to it directly. It all roils below the surface while the surface remains apparently calm. In 361, I set out to learn if I could do that. I enjoyed the process and enjoyed the result, and I find I still do. I'm delighted to see it back in print. (from Donald Westlake's website.)

Clearly I need to get this book ASAP! Here's chapter one. (I've just finished The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which I hadn't read since 1992!)

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Getting rid of the competition

In his widely acclaimed novel The Ax (filmed by Costa-Gavras as Le Couperet), Don imagined a serial killer unlike any other in fiction. A middle-aged man is downsized out of his job in the paper industry and has a hard time finding another because there aren't many jobs suitable for him, and there are a lot of middle-aged executives competing for the few that are. So he runs his own classified ad for a job that would be perfect for him, collects the résumés of the people who respond, and sets about killing them, one by one. So he can get a job, you see. Not because he's a maniacal super-villain playing a sly game of cat-and-mouse with a handsome police detective. Because he needs a paycheck. It's a stunning, frightening book, inhuman and so very human all at once.

Friday, January 02, 2009

Donald E. Westlake

Levi has an elegant tribute to Donald E. Westlake, who died on New Year's Eve. Here's a bit:

Donald E. Westlake himself warned us that this day was coming: the title of his twenty-second novel about Parker the heister, Nobody Runs Forever, serves as a reminder that even those of us who work in less risky occupations are nonetheless living on borrowed time. And what better use to make of that time than to sit down every single day at the typewriter and explore the vicissitudes of humanity, inventing characters and getting them into trouble just to see how they might get out of it? Do it long enough, do it well enough, and you just might create something that runs forever after all.

(Westlake, Levi notes, was an Anthony Powell fan.)

(Also: Sarah has a bundle of links. And here is my enthusiastic if brief shout-out to three of his Parker books, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark; they were among my favorite reads of 2008.)

Impossibly good new BELIEVER is out...

The January Believer has been unleashed! Dzyd Theo has an instant classic, twining personal memoir with the quest for the mysterious author of Let's Kill Uncle; you need to read this piece! Plus there's an unusual interview with Gordon Lish; a potentially life-saving megadose of Gary Lutz—

A word that I remember coming out of my parents’ mouths a lot was imagine—as in “I imagine we’re going to have rain.” I soon succumbed to the notion that to imagine was to claim to know in advance an entirely forgettable outcome. A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

...reviews of Jack Spicer and others; interviews with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and translator Robert Alter; "much more." Greil Marcus inadvertently tells me the name of a song that popped up on my Shuffle the other day—it was great and strange and I didn't know what it was (Fiery Furnaces, "Oh Sweet Woods": ).....Don't miss this amazing Joshua Clover piece (another instant classic!) on the financial crisis—here's how it starts:

We could begin in fifteenth-century Genoa with the invention of fixed currency and modern banking, or with the first foreclosure of this current crisis just a couple years back. I’m going to begin near the middle: in the nineteenth-century United States, with banks and railroads.

Railroads being too pricey even for the well-heeled capitalist, banks that could provide grand lines of credit became major players. This concert of powers dominated the nation’s finances, extending the financial network even as they exerted increasingly centralized control. They were only too willing to loan the money forward, both for stakes in the enterprises and in the happy knowledge that the intercontinental railroad would open up new markets. Credit doesn’t just allow for such expansions; it requires them, to conjure its necessary returns.

The relationship was so intimate that sometimes it collapsed into singularity. Chartered in 1833, the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company built a then-lengthy line from Atlanta to Augusta; the firm survives as a real-estate concern. Its rail system now belongs to massive CSX Transportation; the banking division was a part of Wachovia, which was nearly obliterated this September and has under Federal duress recently merged with Wells Fargo, which started in 1852 as a transport and banking company. Two great tastes that go great together.

The salient point is this: that the expansion of the rail systems throughout physical space, sewing together the continental United States with threads of iron, was identical to the credit-fired expansion of financial networks. Not parallel developments, but one and the same. Geopolitical space and finance space are simply different dimensions of the same structure, the same unified market—what we might call geofinancial space.

New year's resolution: I will subscribe to The Believer for a mere $45 and if I already subscribe I will get subscriptions for my friends.

The silence of the jaguar

How do you spell adventure?

G-U-M!

Alfonso Valdez caught the tail end of the chicle fever that invaded the still largely virgin jungle during the boom years. "The chiclero camps were like small towns and there were dances every weekend," the 69-year-old says, reminiscing about the communities accessible only by small plane and lots of walking. "Nobody dared leave before the season was over, and if they tried to walk out alone we would find their torn-up clothes and assume they'd been eaten by a jaguar." Valdez now runs a much more modest camp at the end of a logging track on the edge of the Calakmul rainforest reserve where Baños and another nine veteran chicleros have lived since July and will stay until February. —Guardian

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Two headlines, same day

The "The"

Also from ESPN/Jane:

Greece has vetoed the entrance into NATO of the nation that calls itself the Republic of Macedonia, that the United Nations calls the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and that Greece refuses to recognize diplomatically. Greece insists that, in the U.N. General Assembly, the delegate from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia not be seated under the letter "M." I am not kidding -- Greece filed an objection to letter "M" seating. The nation in question then refused to be seated under the letter "F," insisting Former is not a formal part of its name. Provisionally, the nation is seated at the United Nations next to Thailand under the letter "T," using the "The" for seating purposes -- as if the country's name were The [Disputed Word] Yugoslav Republic of [Disputed Word]. ...

The issue is expected to heat up soon, as the "The" nation applies for entry into the European Union. A Christmas Day news report, datelined Gostivar: "Macedonian President Branko Crvenkovski believes accepting a geographical term for the name of Macedonia is a partial compromise in the name dispute with Greece."

Gridiron grumblings

I. Chain reaction:

Since 1906, football teams have needed to gain 10 yards for a first down. From the sideline, far from the action, two sticks connected by a chain have measured the required distance, their placement estimated by eyesight.

For a game of inches, it has never seemed an exact science. For a game long advanced by technological innovation, from helmets to video replays, the chains are antiques. Dozens of inventions have been patented to improve or abolish them.

Sunday was the Single Most Interesting Day in NFL History, both for the numerous high points and for the Single Worst Game Ever Played, supplied by the Dallas Cowboys. Before we get to the particulars, let me make sure you know about the player of the day. I speak, of course, of Ramzee Robinson. In the second half at Green Bay, Robinson, a Lions defensive back, was penalized for taunting. The Lions at that point were 0-15 and within sight of attaining the designation they now hold, that of worst NFL team ever. After a Green Bay incompletion, Robinson danced around, pointing at himself and taunting Packers receiver James Jones. A player for the worst-ever NFL team was called for taunting in the game in which that team reached 0-16.